Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Abacus, £8.99)

A young man is hiding, or trapped, in a hotel in Amsterdam; his furtiveness makes you think of a character from one of Patricia Highsmith’s slim novels. But this is a very fat novel, and it’s extremely good. The man, Theo Decker, tells us his life story. On a day he didn’t go to school, at the age of 13, he says, he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with his mother. Suddenly: bang! There’s an explosion, there are bodies, his mother has disappeared, and Theo crawls from the wreckage with an Old Master painting by the Dutch artist Fabritius. A twisting Dickensian adventure follows, as Theo, a superlative narrator, gets sucked towards his destiny.

The North by Paul Morley (Bloomsbury, £10.99)

“Each dowdy teeming district blended into the next, brick-cobble alleyways, grey back-to-back houses, deserted wasteland and pubs leading to more of the same...” This is Paul Morley telling us about the area he grew up in, on the outskirts of Manchester. Reddish is near to Stockport, but also to Manchester, the wellspring of the global industrial revolution and the biggest city in the North. The North is a lot of places, and it’s also an idea. But what, actually, is it? Morley answers the question in many ways, and it’s mesmerising.

Time Reborn by Lee Smolin (Penguin, £9.99)

You might agree with Lee Smolin’s theory about time, and you might not. However you feel, in the end, this book is a supreme workout for the brain. For a long time, Smolin tells us, people have believed that certain things are timeless. For instance, the laws of the universe. But, he says, that can’t be true. For the laws of the universe to be timeless, they would have to exist outside the universe. But nothing exists outside the universe. Which means that, like everything else — and here we get to Smolin’s big point — the laws of the universe must be evolving. And, like creatures, universes give birth to other universes.